The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro

(A copy may be found here.)


This is last short story in Jeffrey Eugenides compilation My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, which I borrowed from a dear friend. I haven't gone through all of the short stories though. May they be ravished slowly. ü

Curiosity was piqued by Eugenides glowing description of the story-- that's why I read it first. I hesitate between a review and a personal response to the story: should I go for technical brilliance or its effect? Munro writes in such a way that the grayness of life is ever drawn out. All intermingle. The effect of great literature, I suppose is a tempering of the reader's outlook-- a tolerance for shadings past the borders and the lines.

The Bear Came Over the Mountain follows the story of aged couple Grant and Fiona. Fiona suffers from Alzheimer's and Grant is forced to move her to an institution. A month later, Fiona develops an attraction to an elderly patient named Aubrey. She seemed to have forgotten Grant; and she slips away with Aubrey in their own world, sprinkled with strange endearments she never addressed to Grant. She tolerates Grant, who regularly visits and her almost stalks her, with politeness. He does not tell her he is her husband of fifty years; but despite his hurt, sadness and loneliness that pervade the story.
Fiona never leaves the passages; she is there even when she is not physically present in the scene. The past and the future dally in Grant's mind; the recollections ebb and flow in the most natural of manners. It brings a subtle point about memory and time; and perhaps, the Alzheimer's do not depart too radically from the normal course of the mind. Our walk is never entirely straightfoward; we often wander from room to room, lingering in some and sometimes passing by old corridors with diffidence. Perhaps, Alzheimer's patients are unable to direct their paths; perhaps like an invalid incapable of controlling his bladder.
Eugenides noted in the introduction the complexity of the characters of the story. Though his devotion is most apparent during the time of the story, he had always loved Fiona even though he he was a philanderer when he was younger.. But there is no harsh moral light cast upon him.
Old married couples always elicit feelings of warm, fuzzy, admiration; I suppose partly because it is supposed that their love is divested of any imperfections.-- as if being old rids you of any hang ups on beauty and all else superficial. But Monroe paints a more complex and realistic portrait of love. In the story is a intermingling of eros and agape, though neither is really out of the picture at any given point. And it's never all about love; it's also about betrayal and the inescapable faultlines and trembles of human errors.
At the end of the story, however, Grant's selfless act is still a stark gem of agape.
Monro ends the story poignantly and brilliantly. Fiona remembers, perhaps only for a moment.
“You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”
He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull.
He said, “Not a chance.”

It merits another reading. For sure, a few details eluded the first reading. It strikes me as poignantly, beautifully sad.

By the way, have I mentioned Alice Munro looks like my grandmother? No, seriously. If Grandma was Caucasian, she would totally be her twin.

MUST WATCH: Away from Her, a film by Sarah Polley, based on The Bear Came Over the Mountain